PART1
THE FOUNDATIONS OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
6. Hijacked: The
Division of Learning in Society
They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden:
It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride,
But did not listen much when they were chidden:
They knew exactly what to do inside.
-W. H. AUDEN
SONNETS FROM CHINA
III. Surveillance Capital and the Two Texts
There are important parallels
with the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the
division of labor first emerged as a foremost principle of social organization
in the nascent industrial societies of Europe and North
America . These experiences can offer guidance and alert us to what
is at stake. For example, when the young Emile Durkheim wrote The Division of Labor in Society, the
title itself was controversial. The division of labor had been understood as a
critical means of achieving labor productivity through specialization of tasks.
Adam Smith memorably wrote about this new principle of industrial organization
in his description of a pin factory, and the division of labor remained a topic
of economic discourse and controversy throughout the 19th century.
Durkheim recognized labor productivity as an economic imperative of industrial
capitalism that would drive the division of labor to its most extreme
application, but that was not what held his fascination.
Instead, Durkheim trained his
sights on the social transformation already gathering around him, observing
that “specialization” was gaining influence in politics, administration, the
judiciary, science, and the arts. He concluded that the division of labor was
no longer quarantined in the industrial workplace.
Instead, it had burst through those factory walls to becoming the critical
organizing principle of industrial society.
This is also an example of Edison ’s insight:
that the principles of capitalism initially aimed at production, eventually
shape the wider social and moral milieu. “Whatever opinion on has about the
division of labor,” Durkheim wrote, “everyone knows that it exists, and is more
and more becoming one of the fundamental bases of the social order”.
Economic imperatives predictably
mandated the division of labor in production, but what was the purpose of the
division of labor in society? This was the question that motivated Durkheim’s
analysis, and his century-old conclusions are still relevant for us now. He
argued that the division of labor accounts for the interdependencies and
reciprocities that link the many diverse members of industrial society in a
lager prospect of solidarity. Reciprocities breed mutual need, engagement, and
respect, all of which imbue this new ordering principle with moral force.
In the other words, the division
of labor was summoned into society at the beginning of the 20th
century by the rapidly changing circumstances of the first modernity’s new
individuals, discussed in Chapter 2. It was essential response to their new
“conditions of existence”. As people like my great-grandparents joined the
migration to a modern world, the old sources of meaning that had bonded
communities across space and time, melted away. What would hold society
together in the absence of the rules and rituals of clan and kin? Durkheim’s
answer was – the division of labor. People’s needs for a coherent new source of
meaning and structure were the cause, and the effect was an ordering principle
that enabled and sustained a healthy modern community. As the young sociologist
explained:
The
most remarkable effect of the division of labor is not that it increases output
of functions divided, but that it renders them solidary. Its role … is not
simple to embellish or ameliorate existing societies, but to render societies
possible which, without it, would not exist. …It passes far beyond purely economic
interests, for it consists in the establishment of a social and moral order sui
generis.
Durkheim’s vision was neither
sterile nor naïve. He recognized that things can take a dark turn and often do,
resulting in what he called an “abnormal” (so0metimes translated as
“pathological”) division of labor that produces SOCIAL DISTANCE, injustice, and
discord in place of reciprocity and interdependency. In this context, Durkheim
singled out the destructive effects of social inequality on the division of labor
in society, especially what he viewed as the most dangerous form of inequality:
extreme asymmetries of power that
make “conflict itself impossible” by “refusing to admit the right to combat”. Such
pathologies can be cured only by a politics that asserts the people right to
contest, confront and prevail in the face of unequal and illegitimate power
over society. In the late 19th century and most of the 20th
century, that contest was led by labor and other social movements that asserted
social equality through institutions such as collective bargaining and public
education.
The transformation that we
witness in our time echoes these historical observations as the division of
learning follows the same migratory path from the economic to social domain,
once travelled by the division of labor. Now the division of learning “passes
far beyond purely economic interests”, for it establishes the basis of our
social order and its moral content.
The division of learning is to
us, members of the second modernity, what the division of labor was to our
grandparents and great-grandparents, pioneers of the first modernity. In our
time, the division of learning emerges from the economic sphere as a new
principle of social order and reflects the primacy of learning, information,
and knowledge in today’s quest for effective life. And just as Durkheim warned
his society a century ago, today our societies are threatened as the division
of learning drifts into pathology and injustice, at the hands of the
unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism
has achieved.
Surveillance capitalism’s command
of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of two texts. The specific
mechanisms of surveillance capitalism compel the production of “two electronic
texts”, not just one. When it comes to the first text, we are its authors and
readers. This public-facing text is familiar and celebrated for the universe of
information and connection it brings to our fingertips. Google Search codifies
the informational content of the world-wide-web. Facebook’s News Feed binds the
network. Much of this public facing text is composed of what we inscribe on its
pages: our posts, blogs, videos, photos, conversations, music, stories,
observations, “likes”, tweets, and all the great missing hubbub of our lives
captured and communicated.
Under the regime of surveillance
capitalism however, the first text does not stand alone; it trails a shadow
close behind. The first text, full of promise, actually functions as a supply
operation for the second text: the shadow
text. Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how
trivial or fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction. That surplus
fills the pages of the second texts. This one is hidden from our view: “read
only” for surveillance capitalist. In this text, our experience is dragooned as
raw material to be accumulated and analyzed as means to other’s market ends.
The shadow text is a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its
analyses, and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves. Worse
still, it becomes increasingly difficult and perhaps impossible, to refrain
from contributing the shadow text. It automatically feeds on our experience as
we engage in the normal and necessary routines of social participation.
More mystifying still are the
ways in which surveillance capitalists apply what they learn from their
exclusive shadow text to shape the public text to their interests. There have
been myriad revelations of Google and Facebook’s manipulations of the
information that we see. For now, I’ll simply point out that Google’s
algorithms, derived from surplus, select and order the content of its News
Feed. In both cases, researchers have shown that these manipulations reflect
each corporation’s commercial objectives. As legal scholar Frank Pasquale
describes it, “These decisions at the Googleplex are made behind the closed
doors… the power to include, exclude, and rank is the power to ensure which
public impressions become permanent and which remain fleeting… Despite their
claims of objectivity and neutrality, they are constantly making value laden,
controversial decisions. They help create the world they claim to merely ‘show’
us.”
When it comes to the shadow text,
surveillance capitalism’s laws of motion compel both its secrecy and its
continuous growth. We are the objects of its narratives, from whose lessons we
are excluded. As the source from which all the treasures flows, the second text
is about us, but it is not for us.
Instead, it is created, maintained, and exploited outside our awareness for
other’s benefit.
The result is that the division
of learning is both the ascendant principle of social ordering in our
information civilization, and already a hostage to surveillance capitalism’s
privileged position as the dominant composer, owner, and the guardian of texts.
Surveillance capitalism’s ability to corrupt and control these texts produces
unprecedented asymmetries to knowledge and power that operate precisely as
Durkheim had feared: the relatively free rein accorded to this market form and
the innately illegible character of its action have enabled it to impose
substantial control over the division of learning outside our awareness and
without means of combat. When it comes to the essential questions, surveillance
capital has gathered the power and asserted the authority to supply all the
answers. However, even authority is not enough. Only surveillance capital
commands the material infrastructure and expert brainpower to rule the division
of learning in society.
IV. The New Priesthood
Scientists warn that the world’s
capacity to produce information has substantially exceeded its ability to
process and store information. Consider that our technological memory has
roughly doubled about every three years. In 1986 only 1 percent of the world’s
information was digitized, and 25% in 2000. By 2013, the process of
digitalization and datafication (the application of software that allows
computers and algorithms to process and analyze raw data), combined with new
cheaper storage technologies, had translated 98 percent of the world’s
information into a digital format.
Information is digital, but its
volume exceeds our ability to discern its meaning. As the solution to this
problem, information scholar Martin Hilbert counsels, “The only option we have
left to make sense of all the data is to fight fire with fire”, using
“artificially intelligent computers” to “sift through the vast amount of
information… Facebook, Amazon, and Google have promised to… create value out of
vast amounts of data through intelligent computational analysis”. The rise of
surveillance capitalism necessarily turns Hilbert’s advice into a dangerous
proposition. Although he does not mean to, Hilbert merely confirms the
privileged position of the surveillance capitalists and the asymmetrical power
that enables them to bend the division of learning to their interests.
Google asymmetrical power draws
on all the social sources that we have considered: its declarations, its
defensive fortifications, its exploitation of law, the legacy of surveillance
exceptionalism, the burdens of second-modernity individuals, and so on. But its
power would not be operational without the gargantuan material infrastructure
that surveillance revenues have bought. Google is the pioneer of “hyperscale”,
considered to be the largest computer network on Earth”. Hyperscale operations
are found in high-volume information business such as telecoms and global
payments firms, where data centers require millions of “virtual servers” that
exponentially increase computing capabilities without requiring substantial
expansion of physical space, cooling, or electrical power demands. The machine
intelligence at the heart of Google’s formidable dominance is described as “80
percent infrastructure,” a system that comprises custom-built, warehouse-sized
data centers spanning 15 locations, and in 2016 estimated 2,5 million servers
in four continents.
…
(SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: The age of
Surveillance Capitalism – The fight for a Human nature at the New Frontier of
Power; Public Affairs – New York, 2019)
No comments:
Post a Comment